Root Cellar

[Edwin]

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It is awkward putting mud on a cement block when you have never done it before, but I am doing it! Up until now i have been mixing mortor. First I was mixing small batches, but now we have speeded up our operation, so I am mixing twice as large a batches. We had a lot of trouble getting started, but we are going to town now!

[Edwin]

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Another picture I posted here was of me standing in front of that huge rock. I was going to remove it, but my son-in-law talked me out of that. For some reason the footing/foundation ended up bein 6 inches lower at one end than the other. We built up with mortor, and then poured more concrete to bring it to level. That was our biggest problem. My son-in-law thought he had the forms level, and he still can't figure out what went wrong, but we have corrected the problem now. That delayed us a quite a bit. Then my son-in-law can only work on it one or two days a week, because of the short hours of daylight, but we rigged up a light and now we can work after dark, which is going to help us. We are working hard and fast, and our other son-in-law and daughter are coming from 3 hours away next weekend to help us with whatever we have not managed to finish. We will have the cellar walls completed soon. There is so much to do that it seems overwhelming, but I need to take one thing at a time. My kids are coming from Spokane on December 2nd which is my birthday to help me put my bathroom together as a birthday present for me; green rock on the walls, I will paint them, bathtub carried in, extremely heavy, old one, linolium down, and I will have a very beautiful bathroom!

[Edwin]

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Here is a photo of the cellar/mini basement block walls completed, except or 34 blocks that still need to be laid to complete the wall on this end! We are leaving that open until we take some railroad ties through there to support the concrete pad above. Even though it is getting late in the fall, and bad weather threatens to come, we are thankful that we have accomplished this much! I am now backfilling with dirt, and as soon as I get that done I will be pouring more concrete in some of the columns with rebar in them, to strengthen the wall, so it will hold everything up that is above!

[Smiley]

Not too bad there.Your mortar joints look OK.Thats about your biggest worry in such a wall.As long as your foundation is solid you shouls be just fine!

[Edwin]

Thank you, Smiley! We have a good foundation, and we have been very particular doing this job. We had never done anything like that before. My son-in-law said that in the next 40 years he will probably never do that again, but then he changes his mind, and he is already talking about building the bottom part of a barn wall that way, so now we have a lot of practice! He watched U tubes to see how to do it, and he told me that it was not as easy as it looked on u tube!